Half myth and half movie star, John Wayne rides a lost frontier

First and last, a cowboy by P.F. Kluge

Would you rather have been a movie cowboy in the 20^th century or a real cowboy in the 19^th century?

John Wayne is being interviewed. He fills a seat in the first-class cabin of a half-empty 747 which is crossing the West whose winning his films celebrated, headed for the California where the winning stopped and the films about the winning began. The 64-year-old movie actor guesses he has made about 160 features - mostly westerns - during the last 44 years, and for most of those movies there have been interviews. Interviews a lot like this one. He can shrug the questions off, or he can easily gum together long strips of words that he has said before, or - as rarely happens, and happens now - he can juggle a little of the red wine he takes with his airline lamb chops and discover a paradox that amuses him.

"I’ve had the most appealing of lives," Wayne smiles. "I’ve been lucky enough to portray man against the elements at the same time as there was always someone there to bring me the orange juice."

He has a right to smile, for he has never had to chose between adventure and comfort. The myths of the Old West and the luxuries of Hollywood have converged in his career as a movie cowboy, and that career has now reached the point where every John Wayne picture is a new chapter - or at least a footnote - in a book that is already a classic. His career has endured bad scripts, bad contracts, bad directors; has prospered as Wayne has aged, has outlived the Hollywood studios which produced him, has survived his own California Tory political views, has made him, in fact, into something considerably larger then it, or him: an authentic American legend, a man who ties together strands of dreams and nostalgia for us simply by existing. The recent announcement that John Wayne headed the list of 1971's top-ten movie stars had all the excitement of a tide table. He has been somewhere in the top ten-list for 22 years.

Wayne’s ver presence in a film gives it mythic stature. This has never been more true than in the latest John Wayne picture, a $5 million epic western called The Cowboys. He plays an aging, hard-pressed rancher who recruits a classroom-full of schoolboys to help him herd cattle, teaching them the skills and mores of the West along the trail. For Wayne, the trail ends before the picture does, not with a serene ride into the sunset, but with an unexpected brutal beating by a gang of rustlers that ends in his murder. Although the cowboy is dead, his lessons survive him: the Wayne code and something of his heroic style are passed on to another generation of cowboys. Because of this sense of change, of the old initiating the new and passing on, one feels that, if The Cowboys isn’t John Wayne’s last western, it ought to be: a good film for the movie cowboy to ride out on.

"One of the people from Warner Brothers at first said I didn’t have to die in The Cowboys," Wayne recalls. "But I said that the picture is no good if I live. The whole idea of it is what this Mr.Chips teaches the kids. If I’m alive and they recapture the herd of cattle from the rustlers, it doesn’t mean as much. I guess they thought I was afraid of being a side character, but I just don’t think that way. There was never any thought in my mind that I shouldn’t die where they had me die in the script."

From the beginning, the movie cowboy has almost always done what the script - good script or bad script - told him to do, including dying. He has worked with genius directors and he has acted in front of hacks, "a hell of a lot of incompetents and some I could have helped because I knew more then they did, but I always knew there could only be one boss on the set." This most professional of stars has approached B-grade flicks and classics like Stagecoach with the same equanimity, for the point was not to make a point, but to keep working. And he has.

"Some of the early westerns I made were done in four days," he remembers. "I’d change my cloths, read the lines, change my cloths, read some more lines. We’d start before dawn, using flares to light the close-ups. When the sun came up, we’d do some medium-range shots. In full daylight, we’d do the distance shots, following the sun up one side of the hill and down the other side. It didn’t matter who was the director. They had no chance and I had no chance. They could sell five reels of film with me riding a horse and that was that."

It took ten years of journeyman acting - "You’d tell ‘em what you were gonna do, what you were doin’, and what you’d done" - before Wayne had his chance. In 1938, he rode into the magical landscape of Monument Valley, on the Utah-Arizona border, to make Stagecoach for John Ford, whom he regards almost as a father. The two men etched Fort apache, Rio Grand and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon in Monument Valley. By the time they left the cliffs and bluffs of Monument Valley after finishing The Searchers, released in 1956, the horse-opera has turned into western myth and John Wayne had it all, the legend and the orange juice.

He has been a leatherneck and he has been a Green Beret, but he has gone on being a cowboy, a crusty, True Grit old-timer of a cowboy these last few years. But now he sees his kind of cowboy, his kind of western as part of a legacy which is increasingly threatened, his kind of western tale - "all treatments of the same basic story" - being twisted and diminished.

"Before and right after World War II, every country in the world loved the folklore of the West, the music, the dress, the excitement, everything that was associated with the opening of a new territory," he reflects. "It took everybody out of their own little world. Now that we’ve become embroiled in the world’s politics, the picture’s not so clear.

"The fellows I worked with over the last 30 years authenticated what the west was like. Now people making movies are running out of ideas. They’re making up all kinds of things. It use to be the western was folklore and legend. Now it’s all psychological, innuendos and petty fights. The cowboy lasted a hundred years, created more song and prose and poetry than any other folk figure. The closest thing to it was the Japanese samurai. "Now," John Wayne muses, "I wonder who’ll continue it."

He leaves the plane in Los Angeles, an enormous figure in a black suit, black shoes, black tie, somber and unornamented, save for a pair Vietnamese Montagnard bracelets and a bracelet bearing the name of an American POW and his date of capture. "The prisoner sent his wife a picture of himself just before he was captured," Wayne says. "He’s a skinny guy and the picture shows him mugging it up in his fatigues. On the photo, he wrote ‘Me and John Wayne.’ "

For the last five years, John Wayne has lived in Newport Beach, an affluent seacoast community an hour’s drive south of Los Angeles. His house is large but discreet, more the residence of a California grandee than the showplace of a Hollywood mogul. From the road, only the bumper sticker on the back of his late-model station wagon - "The Marines are looking for strong men" - indicates that this is the right address.

Past a palm-shaded patio, a swimming pool and a caged toucan with an enormous yellow bill, Wayne is finishing a luncheon steak. A few nights before, a national television show broadcasting a filmed salute to John Ford showed the septuagenarian director and his not-much-younger cowboy star revisiting Monument Valley. Now Wayne talks about that chapter of his career.

"I don’t think we ever went out to make a classic. You went out to make the best picture you could with what you had to work with. John Ford developed characters as he went along. You never started a picture by saying, ‘I’m going to be such-and-such a character with John Ford.’ Your character changed with the mood of the players and the effects of the elements.

"There were a great many days when it was fun, especially on the action shots, with the open air, the setting, the background. But the scenes were work, they were always work, because you couldn’t just walk in and read a farewell speech of Cardinal Wolsey. Ford might decide not to kill you."

A certain nostalgia is heard in Wayne’s voice when he speaks of his work in Monument Valley. It’s a nostalgia which has less to do with the films he made there than the community of men who made the films, the rough work in remote awesome locations, the tent cities that were built to house film crews, and which themselves recaptured a little of the era they were filming.

"The feeling of the men who worked on westerns was altogether different from the feeling on straight pictures. We lived in a tent city and at night we played cards or got the Mormons we worked with to sing some of their songs. Sometimes the Sons of the Pioneers were there, and they sang too. It was a kind of captured companionship and we made the most of it. And most of it was delightful because it was different from the way we lived at home.

"When we went to places like Moab, Utah, we’d put on entertainments for the kids. Actors who loved histrionics would do recitations. Victor McLaglen and I worked up an act in which we managed boxers, who were stunt men. We’d meet in the center of the ring and start punching, showing the things that they weren’t supposed to do. The thing became a free-for-all. I broke it up throwing a bucket of water on the fighters and another bucket, full of confetti, at the kids."

They don’t make pictures, even western pictures, quite that way anymore, and Wayne knows this.

"These last few years, everything has gotten built up so, it’s hard to find distant locations for roughing it, like we did before," Wayne says. There are roads in Monument Valley, and summer homes encroach on Oak Creek Canyon, a favorite location near Sedona, Ariz. He can’t go back to Camargo, Mexico, where he made Hondo, because it’s been settled too. And if the remote locations are gone, so are the tent cities, the captured companionship:

"If there’s a road to a location, there’s a motel. You don’t live in tents and eat in a commissary. And at night, everybody goes their separate ways. You don’t have the camaraderie we had in Monument Valley. We’re losing the closeness we had."

Don’t ask John Wayne about today’s westerns, for in them his legends are pivoting and turning in on themselves, his myths are turning into nightmares. In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a cowardly cardsharp and an opium-addicted bordello madam pass lives of missed connections in a muddy, fog-shrouded settlement in the Pacific Northwest. In The Wild Bunch, a film trembling with spasms of violence, director Sam Peckinpah makes savage poetry out of the extermination of an outlaw band. Clint Eastwood’s Italian westerns, filmed on the plains of Spain, offer more random carnage than was ever dreamt of in Monument Valley. And Little Big Man presents a hip, cynical reading of Custer’s last stand, an event which Wayne and Ford simulated heroically in Fort Apache. All these films use the western as a vehicle to express the tensions, doubts and angers of our own time, while Wayne sees the western as part of a sanctified tradition.

"I haven’t seen many films lately that appeal to me," Wayne remarks. "They’re so corrupt, or the approach is so cheap, that I walk out after the first reel. These days they want to show it all to you, they want to shock you, and shock’s all right, but the whole picture shouldn’t be all sweat and hair."

As long as he lives, Wayne will have plenty of work, so he can afford to view current films more in pity than in anger. Still, there is anger in him, not at what has become of the West, or the western, or of Hollywood, but a larger anger which he can scarcely contain. It can begin at any time, this anger, and once started feeds on itself, building into a great rage. Wayne’s association with the myths of the 19^th century leads to a fury at 20^th century America just as surely as one war follows another, as surely as the gun collection on the wall of his den reaches from a Mexican rifle of the 1860's to a Russian weapon captured in Vietnam. He is asked what frontiers will replace the West, which is all won and closed and settled and where locations for a western film are getting scarce. Anger fills the man.

" Your generation’s frontier should have been Tanganyika," He contends, recalling the African country - independent Tanzania now - where he made Hatari. It’s a land with eight million blacks and it could hold 60 million people. We could feed India with the food we produced in Tanganyika! It could have been a new frontier for any American or English or French kid with a little gumption! Another Israel! But the do-gooders had to give it back to the Indians!

"Meanwhile, your son and my son are given numbers back here and live in apartment buildings on top of each other."

Once he gets going, Wayne paces his study back and forth. He’s flushed and he’s breathing hard - for the first time you remember that he has just one lung. He’s filled with distress at how things are turning out, with the State Department in Latin America, with Wedemeyer in China, Mao Tse-tung in the U.N., welfare and minorities.

Wayne leaves the study and paces the green carpet which edges his patio swimming pool and it continues: Dr. Spock, Vietnam, the impossibility of changing things in America.

Try to calm the roar, you suggest that perhaps Wayne has found in the myths and movies of the West a code which he applies to current problems and that this is the source of his dilemma. But there’s no stopping him.

They’d say that human nature has changed over the last 150 years, " He storms. "Which it hasn’t. Little kids are born and they’re nasty little bastards, but we use to realize it and we loved them anyway and straightened them out early. Now we let them grow up with problems that should have been settled at 2 or 3."

If you wait long enough, John Wayne will say all the things we have learned to expect him to say, not to win fans or gain votes, but because they really trouble him. But as we listen to him the voice fades; the louder he talks, the less it matters. When we remember him, we will not see an aging movie cowboy pacing in anger by a swimming pool at the edge of the Pacific. We will see him when he was a younger hero, on horseback, in the Monument Valley of 30 years ago. We will picture him a proud figure in a bright and clear landscape which recedes away from us - and from him.